The Thing About Republicans?

Lisa Witter: Well I think the biggest challenge is if you frame things as a Republican versus a Democrat you’ll never get out of that paradigm and sometimes you have to because Washington works, you’re a Democratic Republican and you go in and vote. But everyone shares some certain value and I think if we focus on the values that people care about. Take the tobacco reduction, you know, almost in most places at least in New York City and California and Seattle and a lot of cities, you can’t smoke anymore and if you used to talk to Republican and say, you know, “Oh we’re gonna ban smoking,” their value system would have said “No government can’t tell me what to do, I’m gonna smoke.” So what we had to do is think about what is the shared value system, well that shared value system is we want people to go into a work place and not have their health in danger and we don’t want our children’s health in danger. So instead of looking at what divides us, we have to look at what brings us together and I believe honest to god that there are much more things that bring us together. So it’s sort of how you choose to pick your fight, that’s the outcome that you’re gonna have if you come together and find, you know, it was interesting, when I was on this reality TV show, my political consultant was Frank Luntz okay so Frank Luntz is like the Republican like he’s the guy who came off the language for contract with America. When I first met him I was highly skeptical, like “Oh my gosh, this guy’s a Republican, I’m a die-hard liberal” but then I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot about how to bring people together and then help move people in another direction and I think that Barack Obama is really trying to do that this election.

Lisa Witter talks about the importance of a political party's shared values.

Even the optimists among us would have to admit 2018 was a challenging year. The fractured world that became the focus of our 2018 Annual Meeting a year ago came under further pressure from populist rhetoric and rising nationalist agendas. At the same time, the urgent need for coordinated global action in areas such as climate change, inequality and the impact of automation on jobs became more intense.